Rather than start a new OT Sony thread, I think I'll just resurrect this one. I continue to be a wee bit fascinated by what Sony is doing with their a7 "line". Despite the similar naming convention, they aren't the same camera (at all) but each seem to have a radically different sensor inside and each has it's own unique strength. They all are full frame. Since Pentax has a fairly long track record of using Sony sensors, I have to believe that Ricoh/Pentax is going to be selecting from among these sensors for their own future offering(s) in the full frame arena.
The one that has my attention is the a7s. Although it is only 12MP its high ISO performance is off the charts. (If you thought the K-5 family was great in this regard, get a load of the a7s). Here is a high ISO video test comparing the a7s with other Sony cameras and a Nikon D810. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KsywiyX1iKE Since two areas of photography that I am currently interested in are low-light endeavors (astrophotography and stormchasing) the a7s performance has me thinking about selling a kidney. The body isn't terribly priced (at all, IMHO) but the good lenses for it are not cheap. For stormchasing, I would probably pair it with the inexpensive Samyang 14mm f2.8 on it. (That lens outperforms Canon's 14mm in some significant ways: http://www.extremeinstability.com/lens14mm.html Sony has some other things coming down the pike and it will be interesting to see how they perform and how they are priced. The a9 (to be officially announced soon) is rumored to have a 46MP full frame sensor. And I'm very curious to see how the new Sony curved sensor performs, particularly with legacy lenses. No lens puts out a flat field, so it would be interesting to see if using a curved sensor actually made legacy lenses perform better than they did on a flat sensor (with respects to corner sharpness and coma, in particular). The first full frame curved sensor is going to be in a new RX model in 2015. The curved sensor just MIGHT be the biggest leap forward in digital cameras since we left CCDs and went to CMOS. Time will tell. Based upon this plethora of sensors, it would not surprise me at all if Pentax announced not just one, but two full frame cameras in 2015... similar in form factor, but featuring different sensors. Or, like Lucy pulling the football away from Charlie Brown, maybe 2015 lets Pentax FF wishers down yet again. For the record, I'm not pining for a full frame camera. It is the low light capabilities of the a7s that interest me and they are a function of the fact that it is a low pixel density, full frame sensor. -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List PDML@pdml.net http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
